This short story is one of many – 78 exactly. An episodic series inspired by the traditional tarot. These stories are not meant to dictate the exact meaning of the card, but rather to embody its spirit. Enjoy today’s featured card: The King of Pentacles.

“Tell me when you see a spot. It’ll be busy.” Dana smacked her gum as she pulled into the lot, snapping it against her teeth and rolling it over her tongue. This obnoxiously loud oral ritual was enough to make Ruth consider tucking and rolling out of the passenger seat door.

Such an escape wouldn’t save her from their outing though, and so she strangled the strap of her worn leather purse instead. “It’s the middle of the day. Do you really think it’s going to be busy?”

Dana popped a bubble against her two front teeth, fishing the gum back into her mouth through the awkward gap gifted to her from her father’s genetics. She chewed in Ruth’s direction as she pulled into the closest spot to the front for the sake of Ruth’s leg.

“Midday on a Friday. Fired-Up Fridays – remember? Why do you think Mom wanted us to go today? More action on the slots.” Ruth wagered an eyebrow as Dana turned off the ignition and pulled out the key, jingling her dozens of keys loudly just as she’d done ever since she first got her license when they were in high school. Seeing the annoyance on her sister’s face, she grinned. Cheeky. “No one wants a stale slot, Ruthy.”

“Right, because we know so much about gambling.”

“Mom sure does,” Dana got out of the car. Coming around to Ruth’s side, she waited by the door to make sure she got out okay. Taking her by the arm, the pair walked towards the casino. It was a low, burgundy building, with sliding entrance doors painted to look like the gates of heaven. Strange choice of design, Ruth thought, considering their clientele. They let a group of seniors head in first, weighed down with fanny packs but light on dancing feet, gently parading through with an appreciative whoop. The sisters followed.

“Shouldn’t we stop to eat first?” Ruth lingered by the sign that said Please wait for us to seat you at the entrance of the casino restaurant. Dana ignored her attempts to delay the inevitable and zoned in on the security desk.

“They’ve got coffee inside,” She hollered over her shoulder as she began opening her purse for the guard. “They carry it around on little carts to keep the biddies awake.”

“I don’t imagine they change their diapers after loading them up on so much caffeine…” Ruth grumbled as Dana teased the guard for not wanting to see her ID.

“You only need it if I win big, is that right?” Dana threw her head back to laugh, the light catching on the patches of scalp showing through her thinning hair. “Going to let me in without so much of a look? Oh, come on now!” She leaned forward over the desk, her low-cut top drooping. Her freckled chest sagged ever obviously, and Ruth longed to melt into the carpeted floor.

The guard laughed and waved them through.

“Must you insist on humiliating me everywhere we go?” Ruth hissed as she stepped over an empty coffee cup. She misjudged her balance stepping back down, the ridiculous pattern of the carpet throwing her off, and stumbled.

Dana rushed to her side and pulled her in close. She waited until she regained her balance to tease, “It’s not like he wasn’t already lookin’. Poor thing is probably bored to tears playing big man out there by himself all day!” She readjusted her wired bra with a not-so-subtle touch. Ruth imagined the pair of them must have been a sight, silver-haired but only now old enough for their glasses prescriptions to become something that needed weeks to adjust to. Dana never did care about getting older; she was as wild as ever. Ruth felt a responsibility to compensate for her sister, and had chosen to humble herself for the both of them. She wore little to no makeup, a modest cardigan, and a necklace containing her father’s ashes. She touched the necklace chain self-consciously, wondering what her father would think if he could see her now, walking into a casino with his money fat in her wallet.

The appeal this place had to their mother was completely lost on Ruth. Dana enjoyed the theatre of it all, the loud flashing lights and the guards wearing their vests, peeking over the shoulders of dull-eyed patrons. She enjoyed the loud noises, the different Chinese animals all promising endless fortune and gold and nifty little songs to celebrate winning fifty cents.

Ruth found the place to be a sensory nightmare. She had been to a casino one singular time in her past, and would have never admitted it to her father when he was alive. How inappropriate it seemed now that she should come here with his money burning a hole through her purse. Money from his pension, no less, that their mother had gifted them with the order to spend it all at the casino. Dana didn’t seem to mind as she had been here a number of times with their mother, trips that Ruth had always found an excuse not to go to.

She stared at the giant, curved glowing screen with several happy monkeys dancing about. They waved at her with hands full of bagged gold, coins spilling out in hapless excess.

“You want to try this one?” Dana followed her strained stare. Sitting down in front of the jumping monkeys, she pat the swivel stool at the machine beside hers.

Ruth sat down with her own circus of monkeys. She touched the buttons on the console before her, thinking of when she was a little girl and would sneak episodes of some sinful sci-fi show her parents didn’t want her watching. If she were still young, she would have imagined herself at the console of a space ship, hurtling through the atmosphere at fifteen-hundred micro-seconds. Then, her father would tell her to stop playing and go study for school, or she would never find a job and her future family would fall into ruin.

Her hands looked old on the console beside all the blinking lights and buttons exclaiming higher and higher bids.

She took out the thin envelope from the bank that her mother had given them. Splitting the cash almost in two perfect halves, she took the smaller portion and handed her sister the greater. Her sister shoved a twenty into the mouth of the machine, feeding it with an easy smile. “Let’s play!” She said as she pulled the lever at the side of the console. The slots made a satisfying clinking noise as they fell into place. Satisfying as the motion was, she wouldn’t be using the lever for long before she switched to the simplicity of pressing the Repeat Bid button.

Dana had already won twenty cents and lost fifteen dollars by the time Ruth got her first bill near the hungry maw of the machine. The monkeys motioned for her to come closer, to abandon the principles her father had raised her by and sacrifice the green plastic he had worked all his life for. How foolish this felt to burn away the money her father had worked all his life for on some whim of their mother’s. The more her sister laughed at the number going down, the worse Ruth felt.

Her father had spent most of their childhood working.

He was rarely home, always gone on some site visit for the company, repairing something or other because no one else knew how. He would come home still stewing from the drive in traffic and complain about dinner not being made already before sitting down in front of the TV. Remote in hand, he watched game after game of hockey. The only time he acknowledged his children on nights like these was when they were being too loud and he wanted them to shush. He often missed recitals and plays, award ceremonies and first days.

Graduations, though, he never missed.

He wasn’t made of stone, after all, and would come with a big, gap-toothed smile and a handful of flowers for whichever lucky daughter graduated that day. He only smiled like this on special occasions, his expression normally trapped under the weight of being the sole bread winner for a family of four. But on these sunny, perfect days, he smiled with absolute radiance. Graduations, weddings, and the birth of Ruth’s second child all earned his celebratory self.

It was only during the birth of her first child that he was too occupied by joyful sobbing to give that smile.

The console swam before her. The monkeys all blurred into one twitching lump. All she could see was her dad’s face as she remembered it, healthy and full, before the disease drained every ounce of warmth from him.

“Ruthy, are you okay?”

Her father had spent most of her childhood working.

When he was on his deathbed, he held her hand and wouldn’t let go. He told her to let her husband take care of her. “I don’t want you working yourself to the bone,” He said after a lifetime of telling her to do exactly that. Shaking his head, his neck looked so frail she feared the fine bones would snap under the twisting of all his sagging skin. “You’ll miss so much, working all the time.” In his eyes was a cloud of regret she had never seen before. She felt that in that moment, her dad was sharing something with her, a secret he had intended on keeping all the way into the next life, but had decided at the very last moment to impart it upon her.

“All we have is time, Ruthy,” His eyes were hound-dog sad. “All we have is time.”

The monkeys danced. They cried and yelped for her to play, squawking in her face. Ruth turned on her swivel stool, clutching her purse to her chest, and made to get up.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Dana laughed, unaware of the tears boiling in Ruth’s eyes. She stumbled on her weak leg and Dana leapt up, much to the eager eyes of those around her, seeing the remaining credits left in her machine. She fired the vultures a scalding look and brought Ruth back to sit down on the stools, much to her displeasure.

Ruth couldn’t stand this environment. The lifeless, longing stares zombifying these patrons; the obscene amount of sound effects and flashing lights all carefully designed to hook someone in and take them for a ride. Dana’s number was getting lower and lower. How could she expect Ruth to want to play, too?

“This isn’t right,” She said, shaking her head as the twenty dollar bill was passed back to her from her sister and her hand was brought gently to the mouth of the machine.

“Just relax, Ruthy, you’re freaking out. It’s not your money.”

No, it’s not, she wanted to snap, it’s the money Dad spent our childhood earning! Swallowed up by his job and masculine responsibility, raised in a generation that taught him to shut up and go make money, that if he didn’t keep the roof up above his family’s heads, that he would be a failure. This money was his life’s work, but in the end all he wanted to do was tell her that all we have is time. And it was true, all Ruth wanted was more time. More time with him.

“He wouldn’t want us to be here!” She gasped through a tissue Dana had passed her.

“You don’t know that. It’s not as if we come here all the time, Ruthy.” Dana squeezed her hand, trying to squeeze her out of her thoughts like a fruit from its peel.

Ruth hadn’t realized it, but at some point she’d inserted the bill, and pressed the button. The numbers were going up and the machine was singing a song so annoying it couldn’t be ignored even in this stupor of emotions. Ruth blinked as the twenty dollars climbed to twenty-five, then to thirty. “What is happening?” She tried to sit back from the machine, but Dana held her to her seat by her shoulders.

“You’re winning!” She laughed as the numbers continued to climb. The zombies watched with envy as her credits doubled, tripled in size. What came to her so easily they had lost hundreds, thousands for. She stared at the screen in confusion as her winnings moved into the sixties, seventies.

“I don’t understand, I didn’t do anything!” She didn’t know what to do as her sister laughed. Eighties, nineties. She broke one hundred. “You have to split this with me,” She said, desperately.

“No way!” Dana scoffed. “This is all you.”

“But I can’t take this all, it’s not fair! Please, you have to take some, you’re already practically broke!”

“Which is why I don’t gamble with my own money!” Dana tapped her fingers against Ruth’s rounded shoulders. She couldn’t stop giggling as they hit two-hundred, two-hundred-fifty. Her giggle sounded just the same as it had when they were little girls. How strange it was to hear it coming out of this old woman. “Just promise me you won’t be addicted after this!”

“No, no, of course not!” Ruth promised emphatically. The song wouldn’t stop as the number continued to climb. It was so ridiculous, so impossible that she started to laugh too, first in confusion and then in shock as she breached four hundred dollars.

The monkey in the middle grinned at her. She couldn’t quite tell through the tears swimming in her vision, but she could have sworn she saw a gap between its two front teeth.